The RIAA has just become the world’s largest sender of DMCA notices for the music industry, with their latest batch of take-down notices bringing the total above 25 million.

The Recording Industry Association of America has just passed the BPI to become the world’s largest remover of copyright infringing links from the internet. It took the music anti-piracy group just over a year to request 20 million links be removed from Google the lead to copyright infringing material. Oddly however, just six weeks later, Google received a request for the 25 millionth take-down request. This means the RIAA accomplished in six weeks what used to take them a quarter of a year.

The development has bumped the RIAA into the second spot for all time Google reporting organizations, with about three million takedowns behind the Indian anti-piracy group Degban. “Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. We are using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal downloading,” said Brad Buckles, executive Vice President of the RIAA.

Links are a big part of the problem

Part of the problem is that the RIAA isn’t actually removing the copyright infringing material, only a link to it. While a file may easily be copied online, a link is copied even easier. This leads to proxy sites opening to provide copies of links to the same files over and over again. TorrentFreak makes a good example with torrent tracker The Pirate Bay. TPB currently holds links to around 5 million torrents, but due to proxy sites, you have to multiply that number dozens of times to reach the actual number of working torrents available online.

“As an anti-piracy agent, I can report that this is making life more difficult particularly with regards to DMCA submissions to Google,” says James Brandes of anti-piracy company Digital Copyright Consultancy.